Search Results for: log book

THE SCIENCE IN FICTION

Thursday, March 23, 2006

I’m such a dunce when it comes to Science Fiction. But lately I’ve found that reading the NY Times science pages–or books on String Theory or The Singularity–gives me so many more ideas for stories and comics. Why is this?

Then I came across a great Vonnegut essay about science fiction. He says the best way to get labelled a science fiction writer “is to notice technology”:

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad.

He came into science fiction by accident, observing the small-town GE plant he worked in, full of machines. “I supposed that I was writing a novel about life,” he writes, “about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now.”

WHEN YOU CAN LIVE FOREVER, HOW LONG WILL YOU WANT TO LIVE?

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

On Don’s recommendation, I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s book, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR, which is all about the exponential growth of technology, and humans transcending their biology. Here’s a good beginning essay on the Law of Accelerating returns to give you a feel for the book. I can’t read the book without thinking about Terminator 2. these are my notes.

Also: the Future of Western College is uncertain. But based on the the Provost’s Report, it don’t look good.

And: is religious belief a function of evolution? I’ve always thought, and this guy does too, that if there is an eternal heaven where we can live forever in tranquility, it probably resembles something more like a hell.

Eternity is a long, long time, you know.

I CAN’T GO ON, I MUST GO ON

Monday, March 20, 2006

Suggested steps for dealing with the upcoming apocalypse:

Build up your hatred of fossil fuels and the religious right: “The precedents of past leading world economic powers show that blind faith and religious excesses — the rapture seems to be both — have often contributed to national decline, sometimes even being in its forefront.”
Curl into the fetal position with a Harpoon Hibernian Ale.
Listen to some free Stanford lectures on stress.
Read some Kochalka in italian. Listen to the “Hockey Monkey” EP. Dream about American Elf, Book two.
Take solace in the fact that we are not alone. Technology harnessed by UFOs could one day solve the world’s energy problems and save the world…ha!

THE NEW DIET

Friday, March 17, 2006

Best job in the world: writing about Ghostface Killah for lame-o New Yorker readers. I’ve heard the album, and it is great. (A fun note: Ghostface comes right after George Saunders on my Ipod artists menu.)
If your eyeball pops out of socket…panic. (I would.)
Anders Nilsen’s illustrations for Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales.
Chapter One of Naomi Klein’s NO LOGO, which I read ages ago, but still think is brilliant. Search the whole book on Google Books.

BIG, ER, BUBBA IS WATCHING YOU

Sunday, March 12, 2006

(based on a real photo by Doug Mills that Meg clipped for me…)

Lester Bangs on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.
Junebug would be a great movie if you walked in late and had to leave early. Real people who talk like real people living in a real place. Now where would I be if I was a screwdriver?
Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconcious. Done up as a sweet book by Ralph Steadman.
DFW’s review of an old Updike novel contains a final sentence that I think could serve as a summary for about 50% of fictional characters nowadays (not to mention a few folks we all know): “…it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.”